Thoughts from the pit

(Molly Stevens, 2009, acrylic on board, 16" x 20")

I think I’d call it the pit, maybe the hole. It’s that place you find yourself after completing a piece or after hanging a show.

Your options at this point are as follows: get depressed or start something new. I usually spend some time with the former, and then eventually move to the latter. The idea motivating me being: if I keep making, maybe I can redeem myself (because there’s always something to be ashamed about in what you’ve done). So I'm sure there’s possible redemption in the future, and it will come through what I do, I think to myself.

How many of you are motivated by love of what you do? Sure, there are moments of pleasure, but, really. Be honest.

It’s also while I’m in the pit that I start realizing how impossible self-sufficiency really is. As much as I’d like to have full confidence in my inner-voice and where it has led me, what other people think matters. And thank god, really, because otherwise I’d be an arrogant prick. Like that guy. You know who I mean. What’s his name.

But do you think you have to be an arrogant prick to really make a splash? Frankly, I think so. Does splashing make for better art? No. I mean, look at what’s his name. Really.

Wednesday Vocab

(O'Shea Jackson, better known as Ice Cube)

When I feel like I’m coming under fire, it’s best for me to keep my emotions under wraps.

In other words:

When I want to disarm my adversary, it is best to stay dispassionate.

I respond by first saying, “that’s interesting.” This passive voice suggests that I feel nothing.

“From my perspective” is also a useful phrase introducing subjectivity, without being attacking.

When making art, and dealing with the art world, cooler on the outside is always better.

Take that motherfucker.

Imaginary wandering

Donkey Trail

Good Vibrations

(Botticelli's "Annunciation")

Michael Kimmelman does it again. With his usual arrogance, he proves that he does not like art.

Of all the shows in Europe - or even in Germany -, Michael, you could not find one to speak about in more edifying terms?

The Botticelli show at the Städel Museum is the first big survey devoted to him in the German-speaking world. The galleries are annoyingly jammed. It’s like rush hour all day in there.

Am I the only idiot around who still doesn’t quite get his popularity? [...]

You might say Botticelli represents a bygone ideal of high art, with its literary roots in rhetoric and poetry, which is to say only that what attracts so many people to him today surely has to do with something else. Is it all that decorative panache and those pretty, melancholy young women? I suspect, as with van Gogh and Rembrandt, it also has to do with the way he devised a signature style that acts like an advertisement for himself. [...]

The myth of the pining, profligate lover, craving religious consolation in extremis and dying forgotten only to be rediscovered many centuries later as an artistic genius, accounts for his popularity too. His suffering is like van Gogh’s ear, the perfect fictive yeast for celebrityhood.

The truth is something else.

It’s to do with the vagaries of taste.

First, here's a tip, use your New York Times press pass to get you into shows on the day the museum is closed. That way you don't have to mingle with the commoners. Then you might feel less annoyed and find the time to explain why it's so bad for an artist to have a signature style and yet vague taste at the same time.

assuming my thought processes are of interest

Donkey Trail.

Pulp

TMT: Too Much Thanksgiving. In the meantime, here’s info on large sheets of paper.

New York Central has a non-flimsy 44” x 60” Coventry rag vellum for $9.50. That’s a good price.

The better papers don’t go larger than 40” x 60” but they do go larger in price. I liked the 1114 lb. Lanaquarelle sheet going for $47.72 a sheet.

Some artists glue several large sheets together. I personally don’t like seeing the joints, however.

At Dieu Donné Papermill, you can custom order a 7 foot by 12 foot sheet for something like $1500. I’ll wait until I have a gallery that can pay for that.

In terms of presenting such surfaces, I did see paper that was mounted on stretched canvas. This was appealing because the texture wasn’t stuck behind glass. At the same time, too much texture can come across as precious or craft-like.

One of the best shows of the decade?

(Carroll Dunham, (Hers) Night and Day, #5, 2009)

Dear Jerry,

I really like you. You remind me of my first shrink. In fact, you’re so familiar, you’d fit right in at our Thanksgiving.

Also, I really appreciate your stats on women in the art world, and the way you keep your eye fresh.

And I just loooove your wife.

But, Jerry.

I mean, I like Carroll Dunham, ok. I like the vigor and the cartoon quality, especially in the drawings. And his imitation wood too. Plus, he seems like a pretty smart guy. Like in the Brooklyn Rail this month.

Your colleague at the Times liked the show a lot too. He said something about an alternative to a male-dominated world. But, I don’t know, mega twats still seem like a male perspective to me. I guess he has a right to his opinion, though.

But, come on, Jerry. One of the best shows of the decade?

All my arguments against the show (the offensive holes, the ugly stylized landscape, the graceless lines, the depthless color, the redundant imagery, the clumsy composition) seem to be part of the point (the dominance of pornography, the nude in art history, high and low esthetics). This leaves me with only one thing to say. I don’t like ‘em and I’m upset you do.

Please come to my show in May anyway.

Bests,
Molly Stevens

A talk with Carin Riley

Good stuff on the Donkey Trail.

Fleshy flesh

(Philip Guston, Untitled, circa 1969-1973)

Yes of course it’s worth it to go all the way to 57th Street to see the show of small paintings by Philip Guston at the McKee Gallery. I like to see how Guston was always working through questions about images and marks – about self and being; the exhibition presents the repeated imagery that became the artist’s personal vocabulary for his searching. Also, the vigorous brushstrokes teach me that he would push around the paint until his lines and shapes sat solidly on the canvas.

Down the hall, at Edwynn Houk, a show of Brassaï’s photographs from the 30s echo Guston’s human touch. Here are pictures of people being people. Their flesh is fleshy, their feelings are on their face, their un-self-consciousness is reflected in mirrors. And these are certainly pictures of a time past, hats, lipstick, waiters and all. You know that imminent war meant a last hurrah. What remains is fleeting tenderness, moments of interaction, subtly joyous, unhappy and sad.
(Brassaï, Au Bal Musette, Les ‘Quatre Saisons’ Rue de Lappe, 1932)

What's newish on DVD

Anvil: The Story of Anvil (2008)
Real good. A documentary about an 80s metal band that has just never quite made it, but is still trying heart and soul after thirty years. The movie has a similar vibe as The Wrestler: the catharsis of role playing and letting your hair down (literally); the struggle to penetrate an industry and get recognized; fading youth. Is the passion pathetic or admirable? Who’s this artist to judge.

Beauty in Trouble (2006)
No good. The moral of this Czech film is that there are some guys you just want to fuck. Fine. The leading actress is pretty.


Treeless Mountain (2008)
Real heartbreaking. A film made by the Korean-American directress So Yong Kim (in Korean) follows two sisters (age sixish and fourish) left by their mother with family members outside the urban center they know. The camera remains essentially at child-height, which along with the many close-ups, points sharply to the psychological effects of a mother-child non-bond. Magical thinking, separation anxiety, and parental narcissism – all over again.

Web Presence

I have a very spiffy new website. Please take a look. It really pays to go professional. If you’re on the lookout for a designer, I recommend Alda.

MollyStevensVisualArt.com

Also, they say Facebook is good for the career. So, I’ve started a fan page, which you can join by clicking that thing on the sidebar. I wish I had known about the fan page before I set up a personal page. I hope to get out of the latter soon.

I learned that Facebook viewing stimulates the same part of the brain as cocaine. I believe it. Last night, after a day of this madness, the words were jumping up and down in my book. Mama mia.

Roberta Report

I went warily to hear Roberta Smith speak last week, because she has become such a standard, a voice in my mind; I didn’t want to leave disappointed, like I did when I went to hear Al Green in Coney Island a few years back. I didn’t.

She spoke in metaphors and a lot about how art making and art viewing is an experience, albeit a mysterious and personal one, requiring not only self-awareness but awareness in general. In fact, she said art was a way to become conscious. It’s true. I had never put it into words like that and that will stick with me as a reason why I love/hate it so.

Her personal path was familiar: love, terror, depression, therapy, terror, therapy, turning thirty-five, coming in to her own voice. In terms of the power she wields, she spoke of it mostly in terms of credibility; that if she hadn’t built up the latter, she would not have so much of the former. She also put it into perspective, reminding us that what she does is ephemeral; an artwork has the potential to last much longer than the weight of her words. That’s true. Still, I wouldn’t want a bad review from her.

I went up to her at the end, and told her that her writing “sustained” me. That was a little hokey, sure. But, I’m glad I told her.

Miscellaneous

This is my favorite commercial viewed during the playoffs and World Series.

For its vivid description of what we see, this is my favorite passage in Peter Schjeldahl’s article on Arshile Gorky in last week’s New Yorker.

Textures of intensely sensitive touch, making forms quiver and squirm, are the most eloquent element in late Gorky.Color comes second, yet it, too, is extraordinary, evoking bodily wounds and inflammations and ungraspable subtleties of nature. Drawing, though busily abundant, feels incidental, like fleeting thoughts of a mind in the grip of an extreme emotion.

Better late than never

Donkey Trail.